Diaries and/or : Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path
Last January, based on information from Paula Maggio’s weblog “Blogging Woolf”, I posted a brief comment about Barbara Lounsberry’s book Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read soon after it appeared. In today’s e-age of letter writing plus, where Facebook, DeviantArt, App.net and a long etc make it easy to get all ten fingers working, it is perhaps easy to lose sight of the advantages of re-considering Virginia Woolf’s diary reading. But on reflection, what do I read? And why. One specific reason why is clearly that constant flow between theory and practice in writing. What this comes down to I believe is authority—or if one prefers, authorship. And perhaps it is a simple step from authoring to mentoring, or self-mentoring. There are many names for the type of writing being referred to here. In keeping with the Woolfian reference, we speak of diary, but also of journal. Many of us feel we are writing autobiographies (sometimes even in our fictions). Where this leaves a person in relation to the e-age is debatable, but as is well known, it is being debated in many places—to the extent even of wondering how far away we are technologically from simply thinking our pieces onto the page while we put our fingers to other tasks. As part of our theorizing and doing, in any case, Lounsberry’s new book follows on from Becoming Woolf. The title is indicative of the far reaching nature of the overall project: Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read (U P of Florida). Thus, moving into Woolf’s middle period, her reading of 13 more diaries is discussed. Virginia Woolf’s influences are thus seen to have included the diaries (or journals or life writings—should some e-term be preferred?) of Beatrice Webb, Anton Chekhov, Stendhal, Katherine Mansfield and others. Names to conjure with… In all events I think this book will be a welcome addition for those of us interested in such intertextual and/or intermedial comparisons.